Pitch Madness SJ-11: PURGATORY FORGED

Pitch: An Algerian painter lures a 22-year-old art scholar to the
Parisian catacombs, plunging him into a black market for ancient art, a
haunting infatuation, and the schemes of a genteel megalomaniac.

Excerpt:

Before the devil led him to the
Aegean Sea, and long before the soaring visions of his old age, he fell in love
with an artist by the Seine. On that evening she knelt at the western point of the
Île de la Cité, touching a shaft of charcoal – dark as her complexion – to an
easel. If the Parisian winter could take form as a woman, he’d found her there,
nestled beneath the March wind that lifted her hair and brushed away the
residue of her drawing. He was young then, Gerald Syzygy, an oversized coil of
wanderlust and infatuation, studying abroad for his senior year; and he
couldn’t look away from the artist as she recreated the Pont des Arts, its
trelliswork and pedestrian kiosks, the streams of people mingling there.

When she shifted to her hip and dared
him with her eyes, holy shit, he thought, and missed a note on his
harmonica. The other buskers broke off laughing and covered for him.

He hardly knew them during those
eight weeks but he often joined their circles at the Vert-Galant or by the
steps of Sacré Coeur, adding his harmonica to their guitars, flutes, and
concertinas, their woolen hats and frumpy clothes of that year, 1996. The best
place of all, for him at least, was the muted still point on the rim of the
island, where the air compressed their random melodies, never quite repeatable,
but often with an idée fixe of Dylan tunes.

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Heather M Bryant

One day I'll be published. One day I'll have a book with my name on the cover. One day I'll own a purple unicorn. Until that day I'm a twenty-something hopeful with an addiction to coffee and anything that makes me smile.

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E.L. Wicker

Obsessive reader and writer of New Adult fiction. Lover of all things green and leafy, as long as I don't have to eat them. Author of The Bearwood Series.